Where'd my memory go? (was Re: [Python-Dev] Dictionary sparseness) (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.one@comcast.net
Tue, 06 May 2003 11:47:46 -0400

[M.-A. Lemburg]

If someone really care, I suppose that the garbage collector could do an occasional scan of the int free list and chop of the tail after a certain number of entries.

Int objects aren't allocated individually; malloc() is used to get single "int blocks", which contain room for about 1000 ints at a time, and these blocks are carved up internally by intobject.c. So it isn't possible to reclaim the space for a single int, so "tail" doesn't mean anything useful in this context.

FWIW, Unicode free lists have a cap to limit the number of entries in the list to 1024.

The Unicode freelist is more like the frameobject freelist that way (it is possible to reclaim the space for an individual Unicode string or frame object).